“No, no, I invited you for dinner. Now I’ll invite Aus, too, and Nana and Papa love dinner guests, and everybody will be happy, especially me.”

Inside the Macey kitchen, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Macey were in the middle of a serious project—a Martha Stewart recipe that listed not only food ingredients, but also the hardware store requirements. They had been working on this recipe since yesterday.

Austin loved how Mrs. Macey got so happy with her own cooking, she had to smile at the sight of it. “My mom gave up cooking,” said Austin.

“Poor dear,” said Nana, who felt so sorry for anybody who didn’t love cooking. “Don’t you think a good hot dinner with a crisp salad and a yummy dessert, say silk chocolate pie in a crushed-cookie crust, would cheer her up?”

For the first time, Aus saw a resemblance between his grandmother and Macey’s—the little hint that Mom wasn’t conducting herself the way she’d been brought up. “Sure, if you made it for her,” he said easily.

“No, no, the zest is in making it yourself, Austin. All the lovely little chores. The measuring, the mixing, the chopping, the toasting and then all the lovely waiting.”

But Macey and I, thought Austin, have parents who do not wait. Waiting is not lovely for them, it’s a waste of time.

He wondered what kind of life he wanted, and he wondered, if he were there and knew what to do, whether he would paste his parents back together or let them go their separate ways.

Macey took a seat on a high counter stool, and Grace took another, so Austin did, too, scootching to get comfortable just like they did. He was glad Grace was around. It softened his uncertainty to have two girls instead of one, although that was mathematically ridiculous: He should have been twice as anxious instead of half as anxious. They all three leaned on their elbows, accepting cups of hot chocolate with whipped cream. Austin curled his bare toes around the wooden footrest and listened to the elder Maceys chatter about nothing.

Between them, Austin’s own grandparents chaired something like six committees. Tonight was committees.

And here at the Maceys’, the world was food, had been food yesterday, would be food again tomorrow. Although his mother did not cook, and he could not think of her in a kitchen context, he wanted to call her. Tell her he was sorry for hanging up on her last week.

In order to keep track of the famous chefs whose techniques and styles ran this household, Nana and Papa had two televisions: one on the kitchen counter, with a tiny screen, and one across the room, with an immense screen. Austin picked up the remote, faced it to the large television and clicked around till he found the evening news.